Epic founder Tim Sweeney tells Next-Gen about the ever-expanding UE3 ecosystem, and a certain game called Gears of War 2.

From his very first game, ZZT, which he designed as a kid in his Mom's basement, Tim Sweeney, founder of Epic Games, has always offered gamers the tools to play with his technology. Over 10,000 user-created levels were made for ZZT, so Sweeney knew there was an audience of gamers who wanted to leave their own mark in interactive entertainment.

The just-announced "$1 Million Intel Make Something Unreal Contest," which will award a grand prize winner a license for the Unreal Engine 3 technology, is the latest example of Sweeney encouraging gamers to follow their programming dreams. Both the PC versions of Gears of War and Unreal Tournament 3 shipped with the complete toolset of UE3, which gives gamers the same technology that Epic is using for Gears of War 2.

"The next Gears of War game will have improved physics features and new lighting and rendering features," said Sweeney. "Work on the engine will continue through the whole engine cycle. There will be major new features we'll be adding two years from now that games just haven't done yet."

So will I, about 6 months later for Games for Windows, since I have to have Windows to play it. Nevermind I think I'll just play the console version on day one with all that new UE3 tech thats exclusive to the 360 for a while. Ether way I have to pay MS to play the game, there is no other way around it.

All that new UE3 tech they showed at GDC will be in this game, Gears will set the bar for console graphics "again". Great time to own a 360, with all the quality titles comming out and library of already number one quality games. Don't forget Arcade an XMB and all that marketplace content, so much to do not enough time.

I hope they add swat roll while firing, the first Gears every time I swat rolled from cover to cover I wanted to do some blind firing while rolling.

jason 360 you sound like a freaking advertising commercial, great time to own one huh, so tired of the unreal engine, nothin but big beefy characters models majority of the time anyways. gears will be a great game but NOT the graphical benchmark like the guy said above, plus that dosent count anyway cause unreal is a engine for everybody, 360 cant run ps3's propeteiry engines so dont try and put the 360 on a pedidistle on the slide JASON360